Interrupted 

The last breath of the old covenant, the final prophecy from the book of Malachi. "Look, I'm sending you a prophet before the end of it all. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their father." 

And then silence. 

Four hundred years of silence.
It's such a long time to be quiet, a long time not to hear a word from your Creator—no more Prophets. Generations
 pass with only those stories of old to hold onto. Zechariah knew this way.  He accepted not living with a new word. 
For Zechariah, it was enough to know that God is. And then the lot fell to him to go into the sanctuary, to enter into the holiest of places treading to the altar which stood just before the curtain hanging thick in weight and heavy as a reminder, DO NOT ENTER. He would come so very near to the holy, silent God. It was an important day for Zechariah, yet all he had anticipated would be interrupted. God breaks the four-hundred-year silence through His Angel Gabriel. Zechariah is stunned. 

A stunned, shaken, overwhelmed Zechariah is relatable to us. When God bends down into our life and interrupts us with His plan, we are left a holy mess. 

"Sell your house and get ready to go to Mongolia." That's what mine sounded like. There is not much to do with such a moment. Ignore it, and you've lost the precious invitation into an eternal story. Act on it, and you've lost your life as you have come to understand it.

Zechariah experiences something beyond his ability to accept. God is ending an era; the world is hearing again. Yet 
here, Zechariah notices only one thing, the obvious. I'm old. And it's this entanglement with the obvious that Gabriel cannot tolerate. In the depths of Zechariah's heart, he wonders, does God even know me? Does He realize my limitations, my real true physical limitations?
 

As the pilot instructed the flight attendants to prepare for landing, I had a Zechariah response. Looking out the window at the icy topography of land I was unqualified and unprepared for, the obvious felt closer than the holy. When do we get our super-spiritual capes? I realized moments before the plane touched down on my mission field that I was tragically just Shari. I felt fear. I'm not the right woman for this. I'm not a world traveler who longs for the next adventure. I want my small collection of friends and family around my kitchen table in rural Illinois. I don't even feel impassioned to share the Gospel with the world. God, do you know whom you have sent? If this story were to play out as anything less than a disaster, it would be through the power and divine intervention of a God far greater than I could grasp. 

Zechariah submitted to what had happened to him in the sanctuary. In forced silence, he yielded to the storyline God had called him into but perhaps still wondered .... how. Reaching back to his roots, he leans heavily on a God that IS. "Zechariah, Zechariah...." Elizabeth looks into her husband's tired eyes. 

"I'm pregnant!"